Ask Ripley

"It's a very strange feeling, having a little alien moving around inside of you," my wife said just now.

I can't really imagine it, to be honest. I remember having a colonoscopy once. The irritatingly butch and public-schooly surgeon convinced me that taking a sedative for the process was basically for wimps. Wimps who would clutter up his outpatient facility with their drugged-up and nurse-time-consuming rantings, so I did what he implied the decent thing was and went without.

His other wonderful bit of preparatory explanation was to explain the application of scope lubricant with the phrase 'I'm just going to grease up the old tyre.'

It was a pretty unpleasant experience, frankly. I could distinctly feel the weird coilings of my own guts as Johnny Eton shoved his lengths of cable up it, and the distant but still sharp pinch of the biopsy being taken was surprisingly painful.

Something like that, that's how I imagine pregnancy might feel. If we were still in the UK, I'd be willing to believe that having a bunch of smug and privileged (if very well trained and highly competent) medical staff being condescending to you would probably add to your woes.

My wife is clearly having the most direct experience of this tiny alien. If she's on the outside of it's unknowable moods and movements, I'm on the outside of her, observing from an even greater remove. I can see it's a massive thing in terms of the impact on her life, mind and body, of course. Somehow I was expecting that more than I was expecting the impact on me.

I trained as a doctor. If I was still a doctor, I'd almost certainly be a smug, privileged, condescending one. Avoiding that likely fate was one reason I left the profession. Another was that they teach you to look at the impact of illness on the patient more than the impact of patients on you. Which is the right way to teach doctors, in all honesty. You want your doctors better able to deal with your ailment than their own crashing depression and alcoholism. Maybe that's cruel in terms of medic welfare, but it's perfectly fair from my point of view. They get paid heaps to deal with my lumpy face or prolapsing bottom. I don't.

Anyhoo. Whatever is left of my medical instinct had prepped me to expect a lot of the physiological changes in my wife. Even to be able to explain or predict them before they arrived, or reassure her as they did. Usually after a quick wikipedia-based refresher course, certainly, it's seven years since I practised and I never did obs and gynae past the student level. But I'm pretty sure wikipedia is what my GP had on his computer screen six appointments out of seven, so that's okay.

What this has since taught me is that knowing what to expect is not remotely the same as dealing with it. Not for me, not for her, probably not for anyone else in the history of anything.

My wife is usually right about things, she's a sensible and practical woman. I'm usually wrong about things, or at least confused and vague and prone to wild flights of imagination and creatively adapted memories that back my bizarre opinions up. As she was when she insisted that I was looking in the wrong coat for my gloves, I'd put them in the drawer earlier, even though I was sure I hadn't despite already checking in the coat pockets four times, she is right again about this.

Pregnancy is a very strange feeling, for both of us.